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<< Previous   of   Next >> Associated Press  (click to enlarge) A bicyclist rides down a path along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Online mapping services are catering to more than just drivers.   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Mike Benbow, Business Editor benbow@heraldnet.com   Published: Sunday, August 3, 2008 Google, Mapquest retool to help walkers, bicyclists Associated Press PHILADELPHIA — With the old gas-guzzler in the garage, you’ve got your bicycle ready and your sneakers laced up. Now all you need is a map of the quickest, safest routes for riding around town. Well, not so fast. As more commuters consider ditching their cars to save money on gas, Internet mapping services, cities and community groups are being pushed to lay out the best routes for biking and walking -- just like drivers have found online for years. Technical and practical roadblocks stand between such a network becoming ubiquitous, but there are signs of progress in this world of $4-a-gallon gas. Google Inc. just launched a walking-directions service. MapQuest is reporting more use of its "avoid highways" function and offering a walking directions service on cell phones. And some cities have developed detailed online maps to help walkers, bikers and transit-riders find the fastest routes. "They haven't yet reached the Holy Grail of 'I want to go from here to there, show me my options,' " said Bryce Nesbitt, a walking and biking advocate in the San Francisco area. The first challenge: how to account for factors that make bicycle and walking routes different from driving paths. Pedestrians need sidewalks, but don't have to abide by one-way streets. Walkers and bikers can cut through paths or trails not meant for cars, but they must avoid highways. Bikers, unlike walkers, need to think about whether a road is paved, and are prohibited from sidewalks in some cities. All these variables mean the fastest, easiest route for a driver may not be the same as for someone on foot or riding a bike. And developing a comprehensive system for non-drivers requires a tricky step: collecting huge volumes of local metadata and getting them on national databases used by mapping services. "In the U.S. we are primarily a driving country, or have been for a very, very long time," said Christian Dwyer, MapQuest's senior vice president and general manager. Advocates believe making electronic walking and biking directions available on the Internet could help change that culture, especially in urban areas. The technical challenge involves overlaying detailed information for walkers and bikers onto existing online maps, and then applying it to algorithms used to lay out the quickest routes. If some path, walkway or shortcut is on a map but not accounted for in the algorithm, it may be useless. "There are some horror stories of the past of people being routed onto the Appalachian Trail or a couple driving off the ferry dock," said Jay Benson, vice president of global strategic planning for Tele Atlas, an international mapping company that supplies data to Google, MapQuest and others. But if these tweaks are done right, the Internet mapping services could tell a biker to use, say, a riverside trail to avoid congestion, while showing a walker to dart through a parking lot to cut off a corner -- or at the very least to head against car traffic on one-way streets.

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